What will future generations condemn us for

National borders and their immigration controls. A quick one already on its way out: bullfighting in the corrida. Another one : Tolerance for bullying. I would argue that rich countries allowing absolute and ongoing poverty to persist in poor countries is something future generations will not understand.

Indeed, many government aid workers in rich countries, those benefiting from contracts in the construction, food and manufacturing industries, those in academic institutions studying poverty and those in international bodies such as the World Bank have a vested interest in ensuring that poverty continues, even though they say they are addressing it. After all, they earn their living from feeding off the poverty of others.

I agree on the factory farming item, and think this condemnation will eventually extend to our use of other animals beyond just factory farming. Unfortunately, I do not think that is possible unless we continue to provide awareness to these issues, and I encourage all to find those issues you are passionate about and make a difference.

That we enforced artificial borders, required visas, stopped millions of people crossing borders when doing so literally meant stopping them from securing basic economic and civic freedoms and protections, and at times literally make the difference between life and death.

Email Address. October 5, at am. Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. They are all but unimaginable when you consider that they are going to hit our children and grandchildren and countless future generations for decades and decades on end simultaneously.

Contact Us. Oct That we blithely sit down to eat veal chops at conferences on ethics I did, once may well seem to them as brutally hypocritical as American slaveholders praising liberty. My own view, articulated at numbing length in my book about eating, The Table Comes First, is that since we would always eat scavenged beasts, the real issues involve the treatment of animals, not just their consumption. An animal raised kindly and slaughtered painlessly seems to me fairly harvested - though I am in the minority in my own pescatarian family and may, someday soon, convert.

The next moral outrage the future may condemn is cruelty to children in schooling. This may seem like much the lesser sin - certainly not getting any schooling at all, like so many girls in Islamic countries, is far worse.

But the Western school day and school regimen we accept uncritically, are, on the whole, remnants of an earlier time, living symptoms of the regimentation of life in the 19th Century that also brought us mass conscription and military drill.

We've outgrown mass conscription, but we still too often teach our children to a military timetable. We take it for granted that long school days, and much homework, will benefit them, though there is not a scrap of evidence that this is true, and a large body of evidence that it is false.

We take it for granted that waking teenagers in the early morning, then having them sit still and listen to lectures for eight hours, and then doing three or four more hours of homework at home, is essential and profitable. All the evidence suggests that this is the worst possible way of educating anybody, much less a year-old in need of much sleep, freedom of mind, and abundant creative escape-time - of the kind that John and Paul found by skipping school to play guitars in the front room, or that Steve Jobs found when, in a California high school, he tells us he discovered Shakespeare and got stoned, at the same time and presumably in equal measure.

We are taught that the over-regimented Asian societies with their tiger mothers will overtake us, but it is Apple, invented by that stoned Shakespearean high schooler, that sends its phones to be made in China, not the other way round.

Genuine entrepreneurial advance comes from strange people and places. In the future, when kids arrive at school in the late morning, and we teach math the way we now teach sports, as an open-ended, self-regulating group activity, we may well recognise that each mind bends its own peculiar way, and our current method of teaching, I think, will seem quite mad.

The third moral outrage I imagine the future espying is our cruelty to the ill and aged in our fetish for surgical intervention. Modern scientific medicine is a mostly unmixed blessing, and anyone who longs for the metaphysical certainties of medieval times should be compelled to have medieval medicine for his family.

But no blessing is entirely unmixed, and I suspect that our insistence on massive interventions for late-arriving ills - our appetite for heart valves and knee replacements, artificial hips and endlessly retuned pacemakers - will seem to our descendants as fetishistic and bewildering as the medieval appetite for bleeding and cupping and leeching looks to us now.

Yes, of course, we all know people whose lives have been blessedly extended and improved by artificial joints and by those wi-fi pacemakers. But our health system is designed to make doctors see the benefits of intervention far more clearly than their costs. Not long ago I was reading these words from a doctor about the seemingly benign practice of angioplasty procedures for heart patients: "It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day, let alone 10 years - and it's done a million times a year in this country.

Finally, I suspect the future will frown on any form of sexual rule-making, aside from ones based entirely on the abuse of power.